


Improvise

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Dinotopia - James Gurney
Genre: Gen, TED Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:43:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: "Hello.  Thank you.  Breathe deep.  My name is Thundertooth, of the line of Crookeye.  Though, to be fair, you might know me better from some of my other roles."A TED tale from modern Dinotopia.





	Improvise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oneiriad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneiriad/gifts).



Be the Change You Want to See: The Transformative Power of Improvisational Theatre  |  Thundertooth

Translator: Olivianne Denison

Event Transcript

Recorded at TEDTalks Los Angeles, Dolby Theatre

August 12, 2017

  
  


[Lights up on the TED stage, applause]

[A young woman walks out onto the stage.  She has her long red hair worn in an elaborate braid, and she is wearing a bright yellow and white dress with a black sash.  She has a stage microphone looped over her ear, and is holding a clicker remote.  She waits for the applause to quiet down.]

Olivianne:  Good afternoon, everyone.  In a few moments, we’ll be starting the talk.  I just wanted to take a moment to speak to everyone, to take a minute to explain how the translation is going to work.  My name is Olivianne Denison, and I’ve worked with our speaker for the last eleven years.  We developed this talk together so it may be shared with you today, and I will be translating live to you as she speaks, but I want to stress that the words are hers, not mine.  She understands _me_ perfectly well, so if I get a word wrong, she has no reservations about letting me know.  

[The audience laughs a bit.]

Olivianne:  Thank you.  Now, if everyone would be so kind as to be _doubly_ sure their electronic devices are turned to silent… for _obvious_ reasons--

[The audience laughs again, a little nervously.]

Olivianne:  --we can begin.  

[Olivianne steps aside to a mark on stage left, the audience applauds.  The lighting in the theatre changes slightly as the stage lights rise several feet higher toward the rafters.]

[The applause silences.]

[The stage creaks faintly.  A murmur ripples through the audience.  The stage creaks again, and shadows move at the back of the stage.  The creaking becomes regular, like footsteps, and the lights tremble slightly.  The murmur rises, and a _tyrannosaurus rex_ steps forward from stage right.  She is dark gray and purple, with a dusty gold underbelly, and her head nearly brushes the top of the stage.]

[The nervous murmuring continues, slowly becomes applause.  The applause strengthens as the _tyrannosaurus_ reaches her mark on centre stage and faces the audience.]

[The applause cautiously fades out.  A few people in the audience are seen turning off their smartphones.]

[ **Transcriptionist’s note: the** **_tyrannosaurus_ ** **is not wearing a microphone.  All audio feedback noted in the transcript is due to her vocalizations overpowering other stage microphones** ]

[ **Transcriptionist’s note: as requested by the speaker and her translator, this transcription will attribute all translated text to the** **_tyrannosaurus_ ** **unless otherwise specified.** ]

Thundertooth:  Hello.  Thank you.  Breathe deep.  My name is Thundertooth, of the line of Crookeye.  Though, to be fair, you might know me better from some of my other roles.  

[Olivianne clicks the remote, cueing up an image of the _tyrannosaurus_ destroying an expensive sports car.]

Thundertooth:  Perhaps as ‘Devil Dinosaur’ in the 1989 hit _Science Gone Mad_ …

[The next slide is the _tyrannosaurus_ attacking a very poorly constructed robot shark on a soundstage beach.]

Thundertooth:  … or perhaps as ‘Queen Rex’ in 1990’s _Surf Versus Turf_ …

[The next slide is the _tyrannosaurus_ roaring dramatically at a CGI alien creature.]

Thundertooth:  … though I _hope_ you do not recognize me from 2005’s _Jason Returns to Space_.  That one was a travesty.  Please change the slide.

[The audience laughs a bit.]

[The next slide shows the _tyrannosaurus_ on an outdoor stage close to a lake.  There are several human performers sharing the stage, including Olivianne; she is wearing a shimmering dress, and is perched on Thundertooth’s shoulders as if whispering in the dinosaur’s ear.]

Thundertooth:  And I wish _more_ people recognized me from my role of Prospero in Tarsem Singh’s direction of _The Tempest_ in Bregenz in 2012.  Alas.  

[The audience laughs some more, and there is some scattered applause.]

Thundertooth: [perking up, growling, Olivianne has to pause before translating.]  Oh!  Someone did see it.  That’s a pleasant surprise.  No one ever clapped at that part when I was rehearsing this.  

[The audience laughs again, louder.]

Thundertooth:  Though I suppose I have been treating much of this as a pleasant surprise for the last twenty years of my life.  I’m not sure if you could tell from those high points in my resume, but I did not attend acting school.  I was born here.

[The next slide shows a lush green jungle, with a broad, brownish river curving through the frame.]

Thundertooth:  I requested this picture specifically.  You are looking at the precise edge of the territory of the line of Crookeye, my grandfather.  It is not the image most people associate with Dinotopia.  Perhaps you were expecting this.

[The next slide shows a picture of a gilded city perched at the edge of a huge waterfall system.  Long-necked dinosaurs can be seen on the city’s boulevards, and winged lizards and gliders soar through the mists.]

Thundertooth:  Or perhaps this.

[The next slide shows a gathering of dwellings built into the lowest branches of sequoia-like trees, with _brachiosaurs_ lifting baskets of people up to their homes.]

Thundertooth:  I do not blame you; both places are very lovely.  But I’ve never been there.  None of my family have.  Not one of the line of Crookeye have ever set foot in Waterfall City or in Treetown.  Ever.  It’s a little difficult to explain clearly.  Some traditions say that we are not welcome there, and some say that if we stray too far from our home in the Rainy Basin, we disrespect our duties to guard our ancestral home.  

[A pause.]

Thundertooth:  You could call me a rebel, I suppose.

[The audience laughs]

Thundertooth:  Since its official ‘discovery’--

[Both Thundertooth and Olivianne make synchronized air quotes at this word.]

Thundertooth: --in 1967, many people have seen pictures of Dinotopia.  Mostly it is just pictures; the currents are generally too rough for most commercial ship routes, and air travel is extremely restricted in order to protect the skybax and other flying species.  That, and most casual visitors are deterred by the prohibitive quarantine procedures both coming and going.  While we seemed to get along well enough with the occasional shipwreck or _very_ lost explorer up to that point, most biologists and virologists have declared that it was a combination of healthy living and incredible luck that spared us from a stubborn bacteria or destructively intrusive species.  

Olivianne:  Apart from human beings, at least.

[Thundertooth gives a loud huff and glowers at Olivianne.  Olivianne holds up both hands apologetically.]

Thundertooth:  We survived, paradoxically, because while we appear to have changed so little in the last hundred thousand years, Dinotopia is capable of adaptation.  I was hatched in your year of 1974, and by the time I could walk, there were electric lights from Chandara city to Volcaneum.   There was already a radio tower in each city, mostly for music and for emergencies.  Telephones never caught on, really, but message transmission… do you know that Dinotopia has the highest per capita ratio of fax machines in the world?  It is true.  

[The next slide shows a map of Dinotopia festooned in red dots.]

Thundertooth:  There is one fax machine for every nine citizens of Dinotopia.  It is considered a family event to receive a facsimile letter from a friend or relative some distance away, and then read the letter out to everyone in the household.  Sometimes, children take turns acting out the letters, or reading them in strange voices.  That is how many young Dinotopians of this generation get their first taste of theatre.  Also, I understand, it makes catching up much easier in the future, as the letter-writer gets to keep the original, just in case they forget what they wrote last time.  Family archivists have never been so busy.

[The audience laughs a bit.]

Thundertooth:  But it was not my introduction to theatre.  My family did not have a fax machine.  Or electricity.  Or food, most nights.

[The audience gets very quiet.]

Thundertooth:  The role of the _tyrannosaurus rex_ in Dinotopia of old was… complicated.  The first stories say that my family and its cousins turned away from the rigid structures of Dinotopia’s society, or they were chased away, for obvious reasons.

[Thundertooth snaps her jaws shut pointedly.  There is a heavy _thud_ of teeth and jaw coming together.  Many in the audience flinch.]

Thundertooth:  Other stories say that Dinotopia’s earliest rulers charged us with defending precious treasures in the Rainy Basin, and a _tyrannosaur’s_ word is their unbreakable bond.  You can guess which stories come from which side.  But in any case, we lived alone.  Apart.  We scavenged the rivers for fish, and we migrated from one graveyard to another, hoping to find one of the elder sauropods or ceratopsians come to their last rest.   Travelling caravans would bring fish along as… well, they thought of it as a bribe, us letting them pass safely in exchange for meat.  As a result, this was how old Dinotopian folk tales depicted us, tales that I overheard from caravans in passing, or from elderly dinosaurs that came to us to return to the earth.

[The next slide is of a human wearing an oversized _tyrannosaur_ mask, with large, round eyes, long teeth, and a tongue hanging from its red jaws.]

Thundertooth:  Greedy.  Selfish.  

[The next slide is of a tyrannosaur hand puppet, with an oversized mouth and the same lolling tongue.]

Thundertooth:  Choosing food and immediate gratification, and always in the role of a villain, or at least as an obstacle to the hero.  The truth of it was, a fully grown _tyrannosaur_ requires one tenth of their weight in meat every three days in order to be considered at full health.  And once Dinotopia opened six coastal ports in 1986 to facilitate the processing of selected imports and internal trade, the caravans crossing the Rainy Basin were halved.  We were greedy.  Because we were starving.  

[A few people in the audience murmur worriedly.]

Thundertooth: … I’m not starving _now_ , thank you.  I’m getting to that.

[The audience laughs weakly.]

Thundertooth:  My parents could only support one hatchling at a time with the limited food in their territory, so I chose to leave.  I headed north.  I passed through other territories, and I had to _keep_ heading north.  I followed a river, as it was the only guarantee I would be able to eat the next day, and eventually I followed it all the way to the coast.  I was lucky enough to have caught a small bull shark for my meal, else this might have ended very differently.  It was late evening, and a large ship had anchored not far from the shore.  A number of tourists had set up a camp on the beach, under the escort of a few _brachiosaurs_ , and they had set up a screen much like the one behind me today.  Do you know what they were playing on that screen?

[The next slide shows the movie poster for _JAWS_ (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975).]

[The audience laughs.]

Thundertooth:  It was the most preposterous thing.  I was standing there on the beach, utterly no idea who these people were, or why they were shrieking and wailing as they watched a large puppet with teeth gnawing on a boat, so I kept inching closer.   The _brachiosaurs_ were mostly asleep, and I was downwind, so I’d made it nearly to the edge of the camp before someone noticed me.  All at once, I had two _brachiosaurs_ trumpeting to the skies, the human guides yelping and running about, and I still had the bull shark’s tail in my jaws, frozen in place like a tree.  In that moment, I thought I was the stupidest example of my species that had ever broken out of the shell, entranced to my downfall by a shiny picture on a screen.  My belly was too full to run.  I would be paste under a _brachiosaur’s_ foot.   

[Thundertooth pauses.  The pause continues.  Olivianne clears her throat, makes an impatient gesture.  Thundertooth growls, hiccups.]

[ **Transcriptionist’s note:  Translation provided post-recording, “It’s called a dramatic pause.  I am an actor, thank you.”** ]

Thundertooth:  The tourists began to clap.  They began to cheer.   They turned away from the screen, where the puppet-shark was sinking with a burning boat, and they were cheering at _me_.  I was so befuddled, I dropped my shark tail… and they began to cheer louder.

[The audience laughs, applauds some.]

Thundertooth:  Well, yes, but much louder.  So loud, in fact, that the _brachiosaurs_ were as confused as I was.  No one cheered a _tyrannosaurus_ … or, no one from _Dinotopia_ ever cheered a _tyrannosaurus_.  Even by accident.  So at that point… confused and alone as I was, I realized that I had to make a decision.  This was a puppet show, but I was no puppet.  I would not be the picture of greed and violence.  I planted both feet in the sand and I bowed.

[Thundertooth swings her head down toward the edge of the stage.  Her tail rises and nearly strikes the lights at the back of the stage.  There is a stifled gasp from the stage hands.]

Thundertooth: [still bowed]  It was my first standing ovation.

[The audience claps, but Thundertooth straightens and continues.]

Thundertooth:  I’d done nothing but stumble into someone else’s theatre and drop part of a fish, but I bowed for it, and I learned later that this is what theatre calls ‘improvising’.

[The audience laughs, claps more.]

Thundertooth:  At that time, travel to Dinotopia was still expensive enough that my audience contained several well-off individuals that were actually connected to the creation of puppet shows such as the one they had been watching that night.  While the _brachiosaurs_ kept me more or less cordoned off from the tourists, the human guides spent the rest of the night fending off immediate requests to _hire_ me.  It was, I could imagine, a terrible headache for them to try to explain why they could not speak directly to me, why the guides could not translate for me, why it would take at least a day to fetch a translator trained in the proper dialects to negotiate… whatever they thought they were negotiating.  I, of course, learned all this after the fact.  I was only hoping I would live through the night.

[The next slide shows a photograph of Thundertooth standing next to a human man with large glasses and a larger smile.  There is a cruise ship on the horizon and a trawler anchored much closer.]

Thundertooth:  But the dawn came, a translator arrived, and this is how I met Felix Goldmann.  Very little of what he said made much sense to me at first, but through that first blur of a conversation, I heard for the first time words like ‘Harryhausen’--

[The next slide shows a picture of Ray Harryhausen working on one of the model miniatures for _The Valley of the Gwangi_ (dir. James O’Connolly, 1969).]

Thundertooth:  --and ‘Godzilla’.

[The next slide shows the original movie poster for _Gojira_ (dir. Ishiro Honda, 1954).]

Thundertooth:  And I heard the most curious phrase.  Felix said to me, ‘ _I want to work with you_.’

[A long pause.  Olivianne does not prompt Thundertooth this time.]

Thundertooth:  I had lived my whole life believing that I was forever apart.  Unwanted.  A burden.  And to hear those words… to have someone reach up to me without fear was… life-changing.

[Thundertooth gives a huffing noise, and scratches at her neck with her foreclaws.]

Thundertooth:  I’m rather sure it changed the translator’s life, too.  I’d never seen another dinosaur rendered so speechless.

[The audience laughs a little.]

Thundertooth:  You see… Felix had no idea whatsoever that he was supposed to be afraid.  At that time, Dinotopia was still seen as a vacation island with novel fauna and a ripe market for fax machine sales.  So many people were interested in navigating the paperwork to bring products _to_ Dinotopia, not many had thought much value in investing the time and money to bring Dinotopia to the world in a form that wasn’t colour photographs and pieces of art.  Or, rather… those that _had_ tried were met with firm resistance in order to protect its citizens.  But I was different, because I was _apart_ from them.  By the rules my family respected, I did not follow Dinotopia’s ruling.  And I chose to go.  

[The next slide shows Thundertooth standing on the deck of a large ship, with Felix and a woman in Dinotopian dress.  The woman has the same red hair as Olivianne.]

Thundertooth:  Like I said… we are creatures that change very slowly, but we can adapt.  I boarded a ship two weeks later, and spent the entire trip across the pacific both in quarantine and _terribly_ seasick.  

[The audience laughs a little.] 

Thundertooth:  If Felix ever regretted hiring me for that experience, he never said a word.  Possibly because he was distracted by Syvella Denison, my assigned translator and chaperone.

[The next slide shows the red-haired woman with a mischievous smile, arms folded and leaning against Thundertooth’s leg.]

Thundertooth:  She was even sicker than I was.

[The audience laughs.]

Thundertooth:  We docked in San Francisco, and… well, I could say that the rest is history, and not be wrong.  On May 1, 1989, I became the first living dinosaur to have a lead role in a feature film.  The first _ever_ .  A _tyrannosaurus rex_ .  I’m not saying it was a _good_ feature film--

[The next slide shows the movie poster for _Science Gone Mad_ (dir. Felix Goldmann, 1989).]

[The audience laughs uproariously.]

Thundertooth:  --I’m not saying it was a good feature film, but it was the first step on a path.  It was something I chose to do, and it led to the next--

[The next slide shows the movie poster for _Back to the Future IV_ (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1991).]

Thundertooth: --and the next.

[The next slide shows the movie poster for _Jurassic Park_ (dir. Steven Spielberg. 1993).]

[The audience erupts into loud cheers and applause.  Thundertooth stands quietly, letting the sound play out.]

Thundertooth:  All in all, I have participated in twenty-three films over the last twenty-eight years.  I am no longer the only saurian performer you have seen, but I was the first, and I still hold the record for the most films on my resume.  Yes, I have a resume.  Olivianne manages my IMDb page, naturally.

[The audience laughs.]

Thundertooth:  You know… I realize that some might think there is a strange trend in the roles that I have portrayed over the years.  It could be said that I am still portraying a monster.  I am still portraying a creature of greed.  Violence.  Death.  And it is not inaccurate, but--

[Thundertooth is quiet for some time.  Olivianne does not prompt her.]

Thundertooth:  This is not a mask.  This is _me_ , and having the ability, having the agency to present myself for the world to see on this stage… there is value in that, in every role.  From this--

[The next slide shows the image from _Jason Returns to Space_.]

Thundertooth:  --to this.

[The next slide shows the final image from _Jurassic Park_ , with the _tyrannosaurus rex_ roaring in victory over the banner ‘When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth’.]

Thundertooth:  To see myself on your screens… maybe as a villain, maybe as an obstacle to the hero, or maybe as the guardian of something precious... because I chose to be there.

[A few members of the audience are sniffling.]

Thundertooth:  Now, my story would be complete up to this point… except that I went back home last year.  I was invited to the capital city of Sauropolis, formally.  Remember what I mentioned earlier about my family never having stepped foot in any of the major Dinotopian cities?  Because I certainly do.  In all my years acting on stage and screen, I had not even considered something rather obvious; that citizens of Dinotopia were watching my films, too.  See, in 2011, something very new and novel came to Dinotopia.  The Internet.  

[The next slide shows widescreen computer monitor and tower setup, but without a keyboard.  In its place, there is a small black rectangle device.]

Thundertooth:  More importantly, 2011 was also the year that saw the commercial release of motion-controlled computer interface, which promptly solved the problem of adapting keyboards to saurian hands and feet.  Now Dinotopians could access the Internet with ease… and many of them were finding _my_ films.  Sharing them.  Communicating about them.  Of course, I had no idea at the time.  I had never thought of returning home before I received the invitation.  And it was a very confusing invitation.  I had Olivianne read it to me three times, and I was still certain there was a mistake.

[The next slide shows a photograph of an unrolled scroll, with hand-written, flowing Dinotopian footprint-script.]

Thundertooth:  It said that I was respectfully invited to the inaugural performance of a new play, at the Sauropolis Grand Theatre.  The play was nothing I’d ever heard before, a piece called _The Fortune Found_ … and I still thought it was a joke.  My agent, however, insisted that I go.

[Olivianne smiles smugly and waves to the audience.  The audience laughs.]

Thundertooth:  So I went.  I weathered the terrible seasickness… Olivianne’s, not mine--

[The audience laughs again.]

Thundertooth: --I sat through the boring drag of quarantine, and I prepared myself to walk into this city that was so foreign to me, and to all of my kind… and there were flowers.  Waiting for me at the main boulevard.  No one ran or bellowed at the sight of me.  Someone had woven thousands of flowers into the shape of a _tyrannosaurus rex_ , and placed it in the centre of the city square.  For me.  

[Thundertooth is silent for a moment.]

Thundertooth:  To be perfectly honest, that’s the only clear thing I remember about that day.  The rest is… in the theatre, there was a seat for me.  It was traditional Dinotopian folk theatre, I was not very surprised at that part, but when the masks came on stage, something was different.  I saw a young _tyrannosaurus rex_ , barely out of his egg fuzz, prancing onto the stage with a headdress of bright streamers alongside the human performers.  The rest of the cast could have been playing animated corprolites for all I could recall; I could not take my eyes off that dinosaur.  

[There is a deep crackling sound in Thundertooth’s voice, causing some feedback.]

Thundertooth:  They had written a play… where he was the _hero_.

[Several members of the audience are sniffling.]

Thundertooth:  It was not until then I fully realized what I had done.  In making that choice all those years ago on the beach nearly thirty years ago… I had made a decision for myself, I had decided how the rest of the world would see me, but I also changed how Dinotopia would see me, too.  

[The sniffling continues.]

Thundertooth:  So… perhaps there may come a time for you, like it came for me.  Perhaps you might find yourself on some form of stage.  Perhaps you will come to the brink of what is expected of you - either to be afraid, or to be the one that causes fear, in all the old traditions that are expected of you.  I hope you are… because until that moment, you will never know what hidden talents you are capable of, or how far a simple act of improvising might change the world you know.

[Thundertooth bows, then opens her jaws and lifts her tongue.  A severed fish tail drops from her jaws into the front row of the audience.  A few of the unlucky audience members shriek and flail, everyone else begins to applaud.  Thundertooth and Olivianne bow repeatedly.  The audience stands to continue applauding.]

 

[ **Transcriptionist’s notes: For more talks, visit TED.com** ]

**Author's Note:**

> So my snapshot into a citizen of Dinotopia in a modern, global setting kind of maybe took a slight sidestep into an analogy on agency and representation in film, sort of, and oh god, I made myself sniffle for a T-Rex's homecoming. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this fic, because I had a heck of a trip writing it.


End file.
